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Monday, March 27, 2017

Something New

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Reviewers
are supposed to ruminate, chew things over and gradually work their way towards
a punchline giving their considered opinion of a book. With Sue Wootton’s sixth
collection of poems, I am too impatient to do this. I want to begin with my
conclusion and here it is: The Yield
is one of the most satisfying, intelligent, well-crafted and involving volumes
of New Zealand poetry I have read in the last decade. This is a poet who really
knows her craft, has a wonderful sense of form, and isn’t afraid to front up to
big questions without getting sententious about it. Nature, time and a nagging
spiritual sense are all part of The Yield,
but so too is a strong understanding of family life and the local. The poet is
engaged in the quotidian world and not sitting isolated on a mountaintop.

In the opening
poem, “Wild”, Wootton takes the artistic gamble of having nature, personified,
addressing us. The poem is a kind of invocation, implicitly asking for human
understanding and restraint (“Scaffold me
with metal, cage me in glass, tube me, needle me, fill me, flush me.”) in
the face of the wild. But it is not conservation propaganda. It is carried by
its lyricism and its piling on of images.

Nature as such
is one of Wootton’s preoccupations in this volume. She delights in the oddities
of nature in a poem about breast-shaped clouds (“Mammatus”) In her poem “Wasp” the
whole scale of human engagement with nature is seen in a small domestic
incident - a man killing wasp is the peer of a prehistoric hunter. There are
many poems about the sea and many references to fishing in her imagery. “Sea
Foam at Gemstone Beach” sees death in small foaming bubbles. “Every Hunter and
Forager” takes a more primal approach to the sea, linking us with other
predators since the beginning of time. And then there is a poem like
“Wintersight” a deceptively “pure” winter poem about deciduous trees in winter,
but carrying beyond that to a real notion of tragedy. It begins flirtatiously:

“The
sycamore hoists last-leaf yellow parasols

against
a clean blue sky. Paper thin they sun-wink, spin,

twirled
as if by flirting girls commanding an admiring eye.”

But
the poem moves on to “the silent, dark
and necessary forces” that strip a tree bare.

It is inevitable
that observation of the cycles of nature leads to a strong consciousness of transience
and death, certainly in “Graveyard poem”, but also in “At Hawea”, where rain
falls and bubbles die on the surface of a lake; and in “Black Lake”,
introducing a destructive, unforgiving side of nature. “Daffodils” appears to
be an elegy. “A day trip to the peninsula” is a five-part sequence, which at
first seems in a holiday mood until its progression of birds (kingfisher,
pukeko, hawk) upsets it with images of predatory nature. The sequence ends with
a shiver. On the back of this sense of transience and lost time, there are also
some retro (perhaps nostalgic?) representations of time past and time lost.
There is the creation of a vanished world in the imagery of “Barrel organ out
of order’; childhood recall in “Three poems at the well”; and an intuition that
children are untameable in “Of animals”.

Is there more to
nature than decay? The spiritual nags at the poet, occasionally emerging as a
guess that there might be something more than the physical universe. This is
manifested in the odd religious image, sometimes ironical, sometimes almost
sardonic, but there nevertheless – not quite “the God-sized hole” in the modern
psyche, but something near it. In “The needlework, the polishing” she
ambiguously “likes an empty church”
i.e. an old church is a purely (and apparently godless) aesthetic experience; but
“Autumn voltage” suggests that mystery, even in nature, might somehow be connected
to religion; the poem “Priest in a coffee shop” is in a similar vein; and while
“Pray” is ironic it again calls on church imagery (putting something in the
plate) to make its points.

Yet the final
poem of the volume – the title poem “The Yield” [about a scrappy tree
nevertheless managing to set down roots in its own way and flower] -seems to
affirm, if anything, the fact of life itself, blind but surviving.

Thus much for
trotting my way through what this volume is “about”. Of course this tells you virtually
nothing about the quality and worth of the poems themselves.

One of the most
attractive things about Sue Wootton’s work is her attention to form. Her shape
poem, “Jar”, has a conclusion neatly echoing and transforming its beginning.
Similarly “Under / Over” is shaped to replicate the descent and the rise of a
diver under ice. Her “little shanty” has exactly the (mainly rhyming) form of a
sea shanty, tho’ ‘tis evidently all an extended metaphor where the ship is the
solidity of love.

More important
than these frolics is the strong sense of the value of onomatopoeic sound. Many
of Wootton’s poems sing and bounce. Take a look at the poem “Luthier”; or at
the central section of “Abandoned stable, Matanaka”, replicating the experience
of a horse-ride in childhood:

Misted
morning rides on horse-wide tracks

on
board the felted ribcage of a breathing beast.

Seed
heads swashed our knees. We parted leaves.

The
passing world itched flesh to snort and snicker.

Ears
flick-flacked and swivelled: nets set to catch

the
pitch of tremors set off by a distant barking dog.

The
bite, the bit, the spit, the froth, the foam.

The
lips that curled back rubbery to show

the
sea-slug tongue, the yellow chomping bones…:

The emphases of
sound here play out the rhythm of the horse, the accelerating tempo of its
pace, and the swift brushing-past of the foliage.

I do not aim to
be the uncritical admirer of every poem in this book. A prose poem like
“Picnic” is good and precise reportage of a family picnic with young children,
but I am not sure that it is anything more than that. Yet this book has some
great poems. The greatest may be Lingua
Incognita – about both the limits of language and how language does not
rise to the occasion of emotional stress. Fittingly, it is quoted in the blurb,
drawing attention to one of the poet’s major preoccupations. Then there is “Strange
Monster” – a genuinely heroic poem, with references to Marianne Moore, wherein
the nature of poetry itself is explored in an extended image of a kitchen. Sue
Wootton’s fine sense of form shines here as the poem is written (mainly) in
iambic triplets.

A personal
favourite, though, is “Ice Diver”, a poem almost in the grand manner, but with
strong sense of modernity. I quote it here in full.

O
feed more salt to that deepest heart –

blind,
propulsive, without a shell, at

each
squeeze pushed hard into the net.

Not
you, fisherboy, winding in your reel,

sticking
to your quota. But you, off-duty,

shoreless,
out of your depth, taking your soul

for a
freshwater swim under ice, who’ll

ascend
your bubblebreath trail

in
holy isolation. You in a dazzle

of
danger, drifting with the light-struck

dead.
You, hooded, sealed in your drysuit

habit.
Monk, sprinkle the salt.

************************

Comparisons are odious.
Of course they are, so I will not make them. Kate Camp is a different sort of
poet from Sue Wootton, and there’s an end of it.

In her sixth
collection The Internet of Things,
Kate Camp emerges mostly as a miniaturist working on a smaller stage than the
grandness of nature. Her poems are filled with ironic, and usually housebound,
observations and anecdotes.

The Internet of Things has
as its cover image the preserved kitchen of the Spartan working-lass house in
which John Lennon was raised. This signals that there will be pop culture
references, as well as learned ones, in Kate Camp’s poetry – as indeed there
are. At the more High Culture end of the scale, there’s a poem that begins with
an epigraph from Heraclitus.

In Camp’s poems
we encounter the neighbours’ guinea pig; a party with adult males playing harmless
but boisterous games; a settlers’ museum; a three-part poem which seems fired
by the fact that the poet’s mother eventually threw her childhood toys away (although
an endnote says the sequence was inspired by a ceramics exhibition). This is a
domesticated and enclosed human scale.

Also in the
housebound mode, there is a very effective and sad poem called “Artist” about
being the companion to an artist; and a poem called “The biology of
loneliness”.Both strike me as really
being about alienation; about being cocooned and overcome by things. I think
they are the best poems in the book.

I admit to
finding some poems impenetrable. What exactly is “Life on Mars” about? I do
know the TV series called “Life on Mars” about a cop living in the wrong era,
but that has nothing to do with this poem any more than the planet Mars has.
What really is it saying? The two poems about St Jerome in his cell – via Rembrandt’s
painting thereof – are genre fun, though the conclusion of the second (the
saint gets eaten by his lion) seems to me a glib sign-off. I also find it disconcerting
to see how often the poet writes “you” when she probably means “I”.

In sum, I found The Internet of Things an interesting
collection with a couple of highlights.